Silver HP
Let people know about us and our project
What's the meaning of our project? From the beginning of the IGEM preparation, we struggled to find the answer. In order to let society now about our project, we used many different ways to show our progress and our achievements. Thus, we conducted our human practices, including the survey and expert interviews, field research, to seek the social impact we could create.
The inspiration of our project came from different news about lead pollution destroying children’s health. Afterwards, we discovered through a document that out of all the heavy metal pollution, lead pollution harm human bodies most severely, especially for children (Hon, K.L., C.K. Fung and A.K. Leung, Childhood lead poisoning: an overview. Hong Kong Med J, 2017. 23(6): p. 616-21). Having discussed with our advisers, we decided to set our topic as detection and treatment of lead.
Social Surveys
Introduction
Lead and heavy metal pollution have been around for a period of time, but people often place the matter in the back of their heads. In order to understand the public needs, we conducted a questionnaire survey on the method of synthetic biology.This questionnaire is divided into online and offline surveys, which mainly focuses on students and the rest of society.
Our second survey, open to the crowd for the course of one month, have collected 232 results from varying types of people.
Sample Description
In this questionnaire, respondents between the ages 40 and 49 cover the most percentage with 32%, while respondents between the ages 60 and 69 cover the least with 1%. Other age ranges are quite close with each other, with the exception of age above 70, which is 4%. 55% of the respondents is female, while 45% of the respondents is male. As for the occupations of our respondents, 38% of them are occupied with careers unrelating to the environment, 32% are students, and only 2% is occupied with careers that are related to the environment. The bulk of our respondents have never heard of the iGEM competition.
Awareness about Synthetic Biology and Lead Pollution
When the questionnaire asked the respondents about their opinions on synthetic biology, 50% of the respondents have interest, 29% of the respondents is unsure about their opinions, 15% have never heard about synthetic biology, and 7% have strong interest. This data shows that at least half the number of people who have heard about synthetic biology would be interested in its information and knowledge.
After this question, when asked about the awareness of lead in daily life, 82% of the respondents answered that they have been aware of lead, while 18% answered that they have not. These results about the awareness of lead shows that although most of the crow have the basic idea of lead, there is still a part that does not. This motivates the team to continuously spread more information about lead and its negative effects.
According to the graph, it can be inferred that at least around 78% of people that recognizes that lead could affect children’s IQ, recognizes that it could affect new born babies at the same time. However, a smaller crowd acknowledges that lead pollution might result in visual or hearing disorder. Regardless, 97% of the respondents recognizes that lead does harm the human body.
About the forms of lead pollution, 37% of the respondents knows about water pollution, 38% of the respondents knows about soil pollution, 21% knows about atmosphere pollution, and 4% does not know about any form of pollution.
Of all the respondents from this questionnaire, 2% thinks that it is unnecessary to develop a heavy metal absorption device, and 14% of them is not sure. Fortunately, 84% of the respondents believe that it is necessary for scientists to develop a heavy metal absorption device. These results tell us that once we successfully develop a device with such function, most people would support us.
Although most people believe that it is necessary to develop a heavy metal absorption device, 66% of the respondents believes that it will be useful in the future, and 31% is not sure about the device’s effectiveness. One way or the other, the bulk of the crowd has confidence in the device.
Conclusion
As shown by the data of this questionnaire, it can be reasonably inferred that the majority of the population in China have the basic information about heavy metal lead and lead pollution. Additionally, the people would encourage us to design a new device that functions to improve lead and heavy metal pollution in our environment. All in all, once the new technology meets the thorough setup rubric, it would gain support from the crowd and eliminate the pollution in our environment. However, the results of our questionnaires show that the majority number of people have little knowledge about synthetic biology and lead pollution.
According to the feedback in the questionnaire，for one thing, we launched a variety of public engagement activities to raise the public’s awareness on this issue.
Interview with experts
1. Interview with Professor Jiangshan Li
For another, in order to repay the expectation from the public and gather more suggestions, we interviewed Professor Jiangshan Li of Chinese Academy of Sciences. After our project introduction, Professor Li appreciated the project value and meaning, and he told us that since lead is indispensable in nature, the only way to remediate it is to transfer or stabilize it. The existing remediation methods include acid-smelting, stable crystallization, etc., which are highly consumable and expensive. It is also possible to produce waste water, which is more expensive to handle.
However, the effective handling method, the fastest and most convenient method, for detecting lead contamination is the test strip test. But, the cost of test papers also needs 700-1000 yuan, and the instrument for testing is more than 10,000 yuan as well, so we are sure of our microbiological (cheap and non-artificial) test method.
2. Interview with the expert of Department of Ecology and Environment of Hubei Province.
We also interviewed a expert named Rui Qin of Department of Ecology and Environment of Hubei Province. As Qin is a government official, we talked with him through telephone. Qin suggested that there is much more lead pollution in soil than that in water (the lead pollution in water still can not be ignored). The methods of dealing with heavy metal pollution are basically chemical precipitation, electrochemistry, ion exchange, and membrane filtration. The places suffering most from heavy metal pollution within Hubei Province are Daye and GuCheng: Daye is located on the land polluted by waste slag and metallurgical fume, and Gucheng is the headquarter of a famous company manufacturing storage batteries named “Camel”, which is also polluted by slag and fume created by smelting and recycling lead. If we have time to expand: heavy metal pollution in soil is generally chelated (EC20 phytochelatin).
Based on all the experts interviews and under the guidance of our academic advisers, we brainstormed,consulted documents, and discussed the solution for lead pollution. Finally, we aimed for detecting and handling lead.we aim to design and construct a E.coli-based system to sense and bioabsorb the lead to provide a promising way for lead pollution treatment.
Field Study
In order to make our project more practical, we jointly interviewed the Yu Jia Tou Sewage Plant, during which Engineer Liu told us that in China, there is strict regulation for controlling the heavy metal content in domestic water, and therefore we should adjust our project to the treatment of industrial sewage.
Then, our team member Pu Wang investigated an engineering research center for advanced treatment of industrial sewage to further study the current industrial sewage treatment technique. During the trip, he found that current physical and chemical detecting approached rely mainly on large-scale instruments, such as Atomic Fluorescence Spectrometer and Atomic Absorption Spectrometer, which is inconvenient. Thus, our portable device based on engineering bacteria can offset this shortcoming.
Troubleshooting
For the technical difficulties during the upgrade of engineering bacteria, we interviewed the microbiologist Professor Wenli Chen of Huazhong Agricultural University. The second half of our project was a bioabsorption system. To test out how well this system works, some sort of detector will be needed to measure the amount of lead left within the solution. However, since no one in our team had previous experience with detecting trace amount of element within a solution, we went over to the environmental department within HZAU to ask the experts about possible detection methods.
She asked about the concentration level we were planning on detecting, and also the other substances within the solution. Since we used LB liquid Culture to raise our bioabsorption bacteria within, and this posed an issue for some detectors as it would mean there would be carbon precipitation within the machine, which would pose issues for further detection.
Another issue was that our concentration was not high enough to be detected with less accurate measuring methods. So in the end, we finally decided on Mass Spectrometry to be the best detection method, but we should measure again using inorganic solvent for further detection. This is super helpful, because the detection data would help us understand how well our prototype is working, which will help with adjustments.
GoldHP
From our initial vision to our final plan of detecting device, the entire program was constantly looking for and discovering inspiration during the HP process. As our project progress,problems continued to arise and were constantly being resolved.
1. Mr.Qin Rui from the Environmental Protection Deportment, reminded us to pay attention to the phytochelatin EC20.
2. The Xiangrong Company’s research has made us pay more attention to the adsorption process.
3. Professor Li Jiangshan suggested us to incease the detection gradient.
4. After interviewing Professor Xie，we increased the application direction and future plans of the project.
5. Interview with Professor Chen Wen li gave us a better understanding of the technical problems of our detecting system and improved it.